First post, please be pleasant ;]
Seen some people on this forum moaning about the price of apples computers, and i thoroughly concour.. but at the end of the day they are fabulous pieces of kit and very well made.
I had an old Powermac G5 i got for free from and old job many years ago, and the build quailty in the case is to this day the best i have ever seen. An architect mate of mine is apple mad! and has a macbook pro and an iMac, the laptop was stunning and had zero flex to it just lovely.
So start to look for second hand macbook pros and found this "gem" on a local second hand site and this was not really that of rare price for this model.
Top of the range spec'd out 2009 Macbook pro 13"
2.53 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB DDR3
9400M 256MB ram
500GB HDD
First thing i did when i got it was rip out the ram and "superdrive as apple likes to call them" dvd drive, put in 8GB DDR3 1333 MHZ (i got second hand for 30€) then i moved the 500GB HDD in to the DVD drive slot with the help of an adapter (Like 5-7€ on ebay?) and put a spare 60GB OCZ Agilty 3 SSD in the main HDD spot(They cost around 50€ here new but this was just a spare i had from and old 4x Raid 0 mad idea about a year ago that did not turn out as planed)
And the laptop is spotless 100% mint even have the box original install DVD instruction manuals etc....
I have it tri-booting, Windows 7 x64, Mac OS x and Fedora 18, it's actually really snappy. Even Rendering 720p is faster then you may thing on the core 2 duo.
The best part about all this i paid 210€ (about 300$) for this laptop. Quite a nice deal imho.
Moral of the story people are buying mac's for 2-3k but why should you, for the price i don't think i could of got spec wise a better of even speced machine from asus, hp etc. Battery last 5hrs when just web browsing. Last about 2.5-3hrs when doing some serious stuff. It's super light and built like a tank, the glass track pad is unreal really love it. Even in mac osx i can VM any linux distro or windows alongside with not that big of a hit on performance.
Can play LoL on it, lower the settings at max res about 70-90fps, have cod4 installed on it getting over 60fps on decent settings at max rez and with an fps config 125fps easy, css and cs-go over 60fps all time at modest settings, but TF2 for whatever reason, kills it on lowest settings with FPS config only getting around 40fps, all of the game i tested where in Mac OS X, so maybe on windows it would be more playable.
Also when i bought this the ad was only up 5 mins, and i rang the guy asap and got it that day, so keep alerts on second hand sites etc and keep on top of it 210€ imho is fuck all for a laptop of this standard.